Ubuntu 12.10 “Quantal Quetzal” takes flight with a bag full of Juju

Ubuntu kicks off a new two-year cycle with fancy enterprise features.

Today, Canonical has released version 12.10 of its Ubuntu Linux distribution, codenamed "Quantal Quetzal" after a ridiculously awesome-looking bird. Quantal represents the start of a new two-year development cycle and lays the groundwork for what Ubuntu will evolve into by 2014. As such, the release is focused on figuring out what users are primarily doing on the desktop and in the enterprise and putting the right tools in front of them to help.

The release is right on schedule. Canonical follows a six month "tick-tock" cycle with Ubuntu, dropping new versions in April and October of every year. It has been six months since the "tick" release of Ubuntu 12.04, Precise Pangolin, which brought with it a number of enhancements to the love-it-or-hate-it Unity graphical front-end.

Bad news for those on the hate-it side: Unity, along with its HUD and Dash, is prominent in 12.10. In fact, it's going to continue to be a prominent feature on the Ubuntu desktop for the foreseeable future. Canonical is committed to watching how people use it and improving it so that it works well, though, so complaints are being heard. We'll touch some on Unity, but it's not going to be as huge a focus in our upcoming full review as it was with the previous one.

Getting Quantal

For the first time, Canonical has merged together all the different desktop installation images into a single unified 800MB .ISO file, designed to be used on a USB stick or DVD. Rather than having to pick from several images for i386 or x86_64 architecture with alternate images for different options, each architecture has its own unified install image which includes all common install choices.

The easy installation of previous versions is still easy, though 12.10 now has the option of enabling full-disk encryption right inside the installer. In prior versions this couldn't be done during installation, and it required the user to set it up later; the option to encrypt the entire hard disk at setup is a welcome one.

The desktop

Once you're up and running with the desktop version, you'll see Unity. It has received a number of additions, all built around the idea of demolishing the walls between local applications and Web applications, and treating them like first-class desktop citizens instead of pages in a browser. Popular Web-based applications like Gmail can be docked to the launch bar, and on startup they will have their own dedicated windows, complete with QuickList functionality, just like a "real" program.

Along the same lines, searches now make less of a distinction between local and Internet-hosted content. A search for a file name or for file contents won't just look at files in the user's home directory, but in online storage locations like a user's Google Docs account as well. Searches for local music will also pop up results from the Ubuntu One store, so if Katy Perry is totally your jam and you're trying to remember whether or not you downloaded her latest single, one search will tell you if you have it—and how to get it if you don't.

This level of integration between offline and online has led to some consternation among the FOSS-minded Ubuntu community about encroaching commercialism, but Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth denies there are any nefarious goings-on. He points out that users should be able to search for anything they want, no matter where it is, and if it's not on their computer then the computer should tell them how to get it. Viewed from that perspective, the presence of "advertising" in search results makes sense, though it is still jarring to search for a file and get back shopping results.

Most of these enhancements were present in previous versions as preview or prerelease features, but they've been polished and made available right out of the box. Refinement is the name of the game across the board for Unity; like it or not, Canonical considers it an integral part of the Ubuntu desktop experience, and future releases will build on its capabilities.

Core changes

Under the hood, Quantal picks up some upgrades. There's a new Linux kernel, 3.5, which brings with it a number of I/O and security improvements. 12.10 also includes Python 3.2.3 as standard, dropping Python 2.x (though it's still available if you need it). The bundled productivity suite, LibreOffice, has been updated to 3.6. Additionally, Quantal comes with gcc version 4.7.2 included.

The server

The real fun stuff, though, is on the server side of things. Canonical has focused its microscope on how and why people are creating websites and applications, and is beginning a serious push to shape Ubuntu to fit those needs. 12.10 focuses on improvements to two hugely important server offerings: OpenStack and Juju.

OpenStack is a broad cloud infrastructure platform with a development cycle closely pegged to Ubuntu's. The latest release, codenamed "Folsom," arrived just last month. Its inclusion in 12.10 lets sysadmins construct "private clouds" out of Ubuntu servers without needing to involve outside vendors or equipment. "Cloud" is a hideously overused buzzword, and it can mean wildly different things depending on the context and the speaker; in this instance, "cloud" refers to "infrastructure-as-a-service" offerings. OpenStack can, for example, rope together a bunch of Ubuntu servers and make them function as a single multi-petabyte chunk of block storage, using the Ceph distributed storage technology included in OpenStack. It can also take another bunch of Ubuntu servers and divide them up into different cloud computing machines, linking them together or keeping them separated with its Quantum virtual networking technology.

Complementing this is Juju, which can best be summarized as "apt-get for services." Where package management systems have taken a lot of the pain out of installing applications on Linux distros (I haven't had to compile an application in forever), configuring and setting up complex services with lots of application components can still be a bit tricky. For example, if you want to get the self-hosted WordPress blogging platform up and running, you'd need to first set up a Web server like Nginx or Apache, then set up a database like MySQL, then configure a vhost and a database for WordPress to use, and then actually set up WordPress. Juju simplifies deployments of services like this by having "charms," equivalent to apt-get packages, which contain all the steps necessary to get WordPress running from scratch. The setup and configuration of the different application components is handled for you.

Juju is aimed specifically at running services in public or private clouds. You can easily build a private infrastructure cloud with Ubuntu and OpenStack, then use Juju to fill it with happily buzzing cloud-enabled applications, all preconfigured and ready to start work. Scaling is easy, too: as OpenStack can scale more servers into a cloud and link them together, so Juju can pull them into different service pools.

Nor does Juju need OpenStack to function: you can easily use it to create services on public cloud platforms like Amazon EC2. Need to deploy a Web application to EC2 written specifically to run on Apache Tomcat and which requires MySQL and Nginx as a reverse proxy? Juju can help, letting you push all of that to your EC2 instance, preconfigured in whatever way you specify. Juju can also monitor the different components of the app and tell you if any are running slow. Rather than taking a stab at scaling up just MySQL or the Web server, Juju can tell you where the bottleneck is and scale only what's needed.

This isn't the first release of Ubuntu to feature either of these technologies, but it is the first time they have been so closely tied to each other and to Canonical's core strategy. Since Quantal kicks off another two-year design cycle which will culminate in 14.04 LTS, the emphasis on services and cloud management is most definitely the shape of things to come.

The review

Ars has its hands on 12.10 and we'll be bringing you a full review within the next couple of weeks. With Windows 8's big release just over a week away, it's a great time for folks to take stock of their OS choices and see that Windows and OS X aren't the only options around. Even better, Ubuntu Server has some outstanding features geared toward rapid service deployment and monitoring that you won't get anywhere else, and we'll go hands-on with some cloud deployment tasks to see how well the system works. Stay tuned for more in our full review!

Whatever happened to Fedora? I haven't paid attention in a (very!) long time, but my recollection was that Ubuntu was more desktop/personal oriented, and Fedora was more enterprise oriented (being tied to RHEL, obviously). It seems from this that Canonical isn't willing to cede the high-end to Red Hat, which makes me very curious as to what they're up to these days.

The table you reference does say October 18 as the release date for 12.10. Take another look. The "25" references the number of weeks from the beginning of May (i.e., the number of weeks from the release of 12.04). It's a little confusing, but the table seems to imply they have some clearly defined deadlines for he production of the OS on a week-to-week basis.

Thanks for the heads up Lee, look forward to the full review (as I do for every Ubuntu review from Ars).

I ran Ubuntu for a couple of years as my primary OS when I was in University. It was a struggle. The ubiquitous nature of Windows at our school required me to constantly remote access into our labs to use simple programs like Microsoft Office. All to maintain consistency with reports being written during group projects.

I still keep tabs on Ubuntu, just waiting to go back. The main problem is that, while I love the idea and implementation of Ubuntu, occasionally I need to use Windows, whereas if I'm using Windows, I never have to use Ubuntu.

Currently experimenting with virtual machines to see if I can work out some sort of balance.

Whatever happened to Fedora? I haven't paid attention in a (very!) long time, but my recollection was that Ubuntu was more desktop/personal oriented, and Fedora was more enterprise oriented (being tied to RHEL, obviously). It seems from this that Canonical isn't willing to cede the high-end to Red Hat, which makes me very curious as to what they're up to these days.

Basically, Fedora is okay but it's not as polished as Ubuntu. You need to lose a day or two setting up things that you'll need. Also Gnome Shell is generally less polished than Unity, so you'll need to fix that too. Gnome Shell review

Whatever happened to Fedora? I haven't paid attention in a (very!) long time, but my recollection was that Ubuntu was more desktop/personal oriented, and Fedora was more enterprise oriented (being tied to RHEL, obviously). It seems from this that Canonical isn't willing to cede the high-end to Red Hat, which makes me very curious as to what they're up to these days.

Basically, Fedora is okay but it's not as polished as Ubuntu. You need to lose a day or two setting up things that you'll need. Also Gnome Shell is generally less polished than Unity, so you'll need to fix that too. Gnome Shell review

I beg to differ. Gnome shell looks much better than unity by default. Unity is pretty ugly.

Note that the new Amazon ad 'feature' is easily removed by typing sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping in terminal, though others may now see you as some kind of tinfoil hat wearing pinko communist.

For those that love the idea and want even more Amazon search results see this bug report on Launchpad, and rest assured that your community input is valued sincerely.

Canonical has such massive not-invented-here syndrome. Upstart, Unity, Juju, etc. All projects trying to solve problems being solved elsewhere, but Canonical seem to find it too hard to play by anyone else's rules, so they go off and create yet another competing project and fragment Linux even further (increasing the burden on people who have to support various flavours). In most cases, they release these projects as core distribution components so early that they're near unusable, and vastly inferior to the things they're replacing (or to alternatives available in other projects). Add to that their penchant for releasing brand-new, massively invasive modifications to core components with their LTS releases and it's hard to know what's going on in Canonical management.

It seems to me that if Canonical put all those resources behind the other collaborative projects, everyone would be better off.

It's the first time I have stuck with Linux long enough for an upgrade to next version scenario, looking forward to it. I assume I will get an upgrade notification in my 12.04 notification bar.

I have a work laptop which takes care of the Windows side of things. It seems Windows is still required

I really miss OneNote on Linux though. Plus Ubuntu is a little bit laggier than Win XP on the same machine. Photo thumbnails on Ubuntu, take 15-20 seconds to fully show up, while it's a lot faster on XP.</rant>

The table you reference does say October 18 as the release date for 12.10. Take another look. The "25" references the number of weeks from the beginning of May (i.e., the number of weeks from the release of 12.04). It's a little confusing, but the table seems to imply they have some clearly defined deadlines for he production of the OS on a week-to-week basis.

Hehe, sorry, misread the table. Though Ubuntu 12.04.1 is the version still only available for download at least in my location. Perhaps later today or tomorrow morning will get 12.10 mirrorred to my installation server.

I assume I will get an upgrade notification in my 12.04 notification bar.

I believe you need to set the sources for Normal rather than Long Term Support Releases (I could be wrong, I'm new to linux).Anyways, looking forward to the review, hopefully it's nice and technical rather than focusing purely on unity or the amazon search default or something equally 'trivial'.

The easy installation of previous versions is still easy, though 12.10 now has the option of enabling full-disk encryption right inside the installer. In prior versions this couldn't be done during installation, and required the user to set it up later;

This is not correct. It was possible in previous versions if you used the 'alternate install CD' (and a text based installer).

Rather than having to pick from several images for i386 or x86_64 architecture with alternate images for different options, both architectures and all common install choices are included in a single file.

This is incorrect. Actual images haven't been published yet, but the RC images have separate 32- and 64-bit images. It's "only" desktop, alternate and virtual that have been merged.

It seems to me that if Canonical put all those resources behind the other collaborative projects, everyone would be better off.

Sometimes, it's easier to re-architect things from the ground up instead of building on existing stuff. You haven't demonstrated that Canonical would have been better served by contributing to an existing project instead of starting their own.

I was slightly hesitant to upgrade from 12.04 to 12.10, mainly because of all the reports about moving from Python 2.x to 3.x. I need Python 2.7 for my work as Django still doesn't work on Python 3 and I was worried that this upgrade would mean I have to jump through hoops to get my computer into a working state.

I'm happy to report that everything still works and /usr/bin/python still reports 2.7.3. It looks like they're maintaining backward compatibility, which is awesome

It's the first time I have stuck with Linux long enough for an upgrade to next version scenario, looking forward to it. I assume I will get an upgrade notification in my 12.04 notification bar.

By default LTS releases like 12.04 will only notify you about the next LTS (14.04 in April 2014). Your OS will be supported and get updates until then so no need to upgrade. If you want to see the new tech, though, you can edit the notification setting in Ubuntu Software Center -> Edit>Software Sources -> Updates.

Edit: As always, you should check the release notes for known issues before upgrading. I always test drive the new version from a USB stick, but that may be just overcautious me.

vortex_mak wrote:

I have a work laptop which takes care of the Windows side of things. It seems Windows is still required

These days I find LibreOffice more compatible than my ancient Office XP, but there's always special software that only runs on Windows. Personally I don't need any, but not everyone is so lucky.

I'm planning on giving Linux Mint a whirl when I purchase my next laptop in 6 months or so. I currently run a Fedora VM for development. But with LibreOffice really pushing on from OpenOffice, GIMP and Inkscape being generally awesome, it seems that probably 80-90% of my work can now be done under Linux. Certainly there's enough shells, file managers, editors, browsers etc to cover 50-70% of my work.

Most of the software I use under Win is open source with Linux versions or equivalents. But there are still some things that I anticipate that I will need to fire up a Windows VM for. For editing/converting CMYK images I'll still need Photoslop (as much as I love GIMP). I'll probably still need to open the ocassional Access DB. LibreOffice Impress misses some of the presentation view features of Powerpoint (which are actually very good), Calc is still a bit dodgy with pivot charts and creating graphs is still a bit of a chore. There's a TV streaming service I use (Eurosport Player) which is only available with Silverlight (Moonlight doesn't work).

But the real killer is I've yet to find a PDF creator/editor like Adobe Acrobat (the full thing, not just opening PDFs). No doubt Adobe like to keep the best bits of the PDF format to themselves. But for me to get to 90%+ of my day done in Linux I need to find an Acrobat equivalent (even though I hate Acrobat and PDFs in general are horrible). Merging/splitting PDFs, watermarking selected pages, editing form fields, stripping Acrobat JS, downsampling certain raster images, exporting comments to XML etc. If anyone knows of anything then please let me know! I think I would prefer to fire up a small Windows VM when needed, rather than faffing about with Wine.

I would love to see Linux reach a level where big software companies are releasing commercial binaries of their software for Linux. That day will come but I'm not holding my breath.

By default LTS releases like 12.04 will only notify you about the next LTS (14.04 in April 2014). Your OS will be supported and get updates until then so no need to upgrade. If you want to see the new tech, though, you can edit the notification setting in Ubuntu Software Center -> Edit>Software Sources -> Updates.

Edit: As always, you should check the release notes for known issues before upgrading. I always test drive the new version from a USB stick, but that may be just overcautious me.[/quote]

But the real killer is I've yet to find a PDF creator/editor like Adobe Acrobat (the full thing, not just opening PDFs). No doubt Adobe like to keep the best bits of the PDF format to themselves. But for me to get to 90%+ of my day done in Linux I need to find an Acrobat equivalent (even though I hate Acrobat and PDFs in general are horrible). Merging/splitting PDFs, watermarking selected pages, editing form fields, stripping Acrobat JS, downsampling certain raster images, exporting comments to XML etc. If anyone knows of anything then please let me know! I think I would prefer to fire up a small Windows VM when needed, rather than faffing about with Wine.

I've never used the non-reader version of Acrobat, so I'm sorry if the following proves insufficient. (I've always created my pdfs with latex and any editing has been only extracting or joining pages through pdftk or gs.)

There is a package called libreoffice-pdfimport which allows Writer to open pdf files from the normal open dialog. The file is editable and you can export it back to pdf or save in the format of your choice. I'm not sure how exact the results of the import are, but pdf is a standard so they should have the documentation (unlike with .docs).

Me too, though for now, I was just happy that I got native versions of Spotify, Google Earth and Skype.

Yeah, Spotify and Skype are the two big ones. There are also quite a few indie games sold through Software Center, and Valve is currently running a Steam Linux beta on Ubuntu. Here's hoping more support to come.

The table you reference does say October 18 as the release date for 12.10. Take another look. The "25" references the number of weeks from the beginning of May (i.e., the number of weeks from the release of 12.04). It's a little confusing, but the table seems to imply they have some clearly defined deadlines for he production of the OS on a week-to-week basis.

Hehe, sorry, misread the table. Though Ubuntu 12.04.1 is the version still only available for download at least in my location. Perhaps later today or tomorrow morning will get 12.10 mirrorred to my installation server.

which brought with it a number of enhancements to the love-it-or-hate-it Unity graphical front-end.

"More like love it or get Mate/Cinnamon" Too bad those aren't bundled with the default install,so people can get them without having to lookup their PPA's

By the way, any word on whether 12.10 finally plays nice with and install alongside a UEFI-Windows install,because upto 12.04 it's been a nightmare to set up (In fact,I just gave up and installed 'buntu on an external USB drive)?

Whatever happened to Fedora? I haven't paid attention in a (very!) long time, but my recollection was that Ubuntu was more desktop/personal oriented, and Fedora was more enterprise oriented (being tied to RHEL, obviously). It seems from this that Canonical isn't willing to cede the high-end to Red Hat, which makes me very curious as to what they're up to these days.

Basically, Fedora is okay but it's not as polished as Ubuntu. You need to lose a day or two setting up things that you'll need. Also Gnome Shell is generally less polished than Unity, so you'll need to fix that too. Gnome Shell review

Gnome Shell is less polished than Unity, but it's also far more usable in my experience. Unfortunately both environments seem bent on making life difficult for users. For example, Gnome decided it would be a good idea to disable the delete key from deleting a file in the file manager by default. Even though the default only put files in a trash bin anyways, not deleted them directly from disk.

Looking forward to the review. Its always fun playing around with new versions in a VM, just unfortunate that the tools I use everyday aren't officially supported (Creative Suite) otherwise I'd be all over this... Still, got a lot of love for Ubuntu.

The table you reference does say October 18 as the release date for 12.10. Take another look. The "25" references the number of weeks from the beginning of May (i.e., the number of weeks from the release of 12.04). It's a little confusing, but the table seems to imply they have some clearly defined deadlines for he production of the OS on a week-to-week basis.

Hehe, sorry, misread the table. Though Ubuntu 12.04.1 is the version still only available for download at least in my location. Perhaps later today or tomorrow morning will get 12.10 mirrorred to my installation server.

I took a look at the UK mirror. It's not there yet either.

Kubuntu's website says nothing about a new release either. Just mentions the beta, which I'm not interested in.

Whatever happened to Fedora? I haven't paid attention in a (very!) long time, but my recollection was that Ubuntu was more desktop/personal oriented, and Fedora was more enterprise oriented (being tied to RHEL, obviously). It seems from this that Canonical isn't willing to cede the high-end to Red Hat, which makes me very curious as to what they're up to these days.

Basically, Fedora is okay but it's not as polished as Ubuntu. You need to lose a day or two setting up things that you'll need. Also Gnome Shell is generally less polished than Unity, so you'll need to fix that too. Gnome Shell review

Gnome Shell is less polished than Unity, but it's also far more usable in my experience. Unfortunately both environments seem bent on making life difficult for users. For example, Gnome decided it would be a good idea to disable the delete key from deleting a file in the file manager by default. Even though the default only put files in a trash bin anyways, not deleted them directly from disk.

I believe that Unity is hated by many users because of two reasons. First, it's a new thing that has some learning curve. Also it takes some time getting used to it, because it makes you change your workflow. Second, Unity in 12.04 and 12.10 is not the same Unity that was introduced in 11.04. The old Unity was way too buggy, slow and had inconsistencies everywhere that made life difficult for everyone. This Unity almost doesn't crash on me anymore and has decent performance and usability.

Note that the new Amazon ad 'feature' is easily removed by typing sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping in terminal, though others may now see you as some kind of tinfoil hat wearing pinko communist.

For those that love the idea and want even more Amazon search results see this bug report on Launchpad, and rest assured that your community input is valued sincerely.

I'm one of the ones with the consternation. Is this the _only_ addition wherein data is being sent to a private, for-profit third party?

The table you reference does say October 18 as the release date for 12.10. Take another look. The "25" references the number of weeks from the beginning of May (i.e., the number of weeks from the release of 12.04). It's a little confusing, but the table seems to imply they have some clearly defined deadlines for he production of the OS on a week-to-week basis.

Hehe, sorry, misread the table. Though Ubuntu 12.04.1 is the version still only available for download at least in my location. Perhaps later today or tomorrow morning will get 12.10 mirrorred to my installation server.

I took a look at the UK mirror. It's not there yet either.

Kubuntu's website says nothing about a new release either. Just mentions the beta, which I'm not interested in.

I believe that Unity is hated by many users because of two reasons. First, it's a new thing that has some learning curve. Also it takes some time getting used to it, because it makes you change your workflow. Second, Unity in 12.04 and 12.10 is not the same Unity that was introduced in 11.04. The old Unity was way too buggy, slow and had inconsistencies everywhere that made life difficult for everyone. This Unity almost doesn't crash on me anymore and has decent performance and usability.

Gnome shell on the other hand... It looks like a sinking ship to me.

Or just maybe because Unity is hated because unlike Gnome2(or even Gnome Shell for that matter),it's can't really be customized to the same extent. And to have something untweakable in Linux is .. well,just wrong

Whatever happened to Fedora? I haven't paid attention in a (very!) long time, but my recollection was that Ubuntu was more desktop/personal oriented, and Fedora was more enterprise oriented (being tied to RHEL, obviously). It seems from this that Canonical isn't willing to cede the high-end to Red Hat, which makes me very curious as to what they're up to these days.

Basically, Fedora is okay but it's not as polished as Ubuntu. You need to lose a day or two setting up things that you'll need. Also Gnome Shell is generally less polished than Unity, so you'll need to fix that too. Gnome Shell review

Gnome Shell is less polished than Unity, but it's also far more usable in my experience. Unfortunately both environments seem bent on making life difficult for users. For example, Gnome decided it would be a good idea to disable the delete key from deleting a file in the file manager by default. Even though the default only put files in a trash bin anyways, not deleted them directly from disk.

I believe that Unity is hated by many users because of two reasons. First, it's a new thing that has some learning curve. Also it takes some time getting used to it, because it makes you change your workflow. Second, Unity in 12.04 and 12.10 is not the same Unity that was introduced in 11.04. The old Unity was way too buggy, slow and had inconsistencies everywhere that made life difficult for everyone. This Unity almost doesn't crash on me anymore and has decent performance and usability.

Gnome shell on the other hand... It looks like a sinking ship to me.

My only gripe is behavior is not easily configurable. I want the bar on the bottom or right of the screen, to be very small, to remove default buttons, etc. Gnome2 was fairly easy to edit. Plus: needs a switcher like Windows alt+tab (like what it had in Compiz).

Funny, I never thought about Ubuntu releases as ticks and toks. Tick/tok makes sense for intel, but Canonical? I must be missing something here.Ranting aside, I've been using 12.10 since beta1 and it's been solid, bar the issue where grub2 takes its sweet time to render the menu.

Canonical has such massive not-invented-here syndrome. Upstart, Unity, Juju, etc. All projects trying to solve problems being solved elsewhere, but Canonical seem to find it too hard to play by anyone else's rules, so they go off and create yet another competing project and fragment Linux even further (increasing the burden on people who have to support various flavours).

Welcome to Linux, land of 8 bajillion distros and people thinking they have the right answer to solve the issue, so they code it and probably rail against the existing methods. http://xkcd.com/927/

EDIT: -8 huh? Looks like the truth hurts. Seriously, how many different projects are there out there to solve the same problem. I won't even start on how many desktop environments there are, that's just low-hanging fruit.

Lee Hutchinson / Lee is the Senior Reviews Editor at Ars and is responsible for the product news and reviews section. He also knows stuff about enterprise storage, security, and manned space flight. Lee is based in Houston, TX.